


Beyond that first frozen moment

by Dark_Ruby_Regalia



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Ending, IgNoct, Kinda NSFW in bits, Liminal stuff, M/M, Noctis Lives, Older, Some Fluff, time skip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-03 15:33:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13999170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Ruby_Regalia/pseuds/Dark_Ruby_Regalia
Summary: A small collection of IgNoct moments that belong together. Just like Ignis and Noctis belong together, which they finally figure out.





	Beyond that first frozen moment

 

_ Then _

~

 

Noctis was in control, but it was taking effort.

 

“It’s just business,” he said, shaking his head in frustration. His eyes were unsettled, a firm scowl set dark across the his soft features, bedding in.

 

“Marriage is hardly  _ ‘just business’ _ ,” Ignis spat. In a turn of roles, he was the one pacing the room, agitated and angry, hoping the constant motion would keep him out of reach of a pack of emotions he knew were trailing him and gaining.

 

“I’ve come to terms with it,” Noctis said, hiding any errant waver in his expression with a tired hand brushed across his face. When he reappeared from behind it, he stopped Ignis in his track with the resolve in his gaze, and addressed what they were both afraid to acknowledge. “Nothing will change between us.”

 

For a fraction it almost held. Ignis was still as stone a brief moment while their eyes locked, his mind filtering the hope out before it reached his heart. Then the pacing resumed, and Noctis slumped onto an unforgiving seat, and nothing more was said...

 

Weeks later, they’d grown accustomed to pretending the marriage would never come. It was easy to deny it, to justify diversions, to find in their synchronisation - their shared rituals of living - some kind of proof that they belonged. They were together now more than ever: Through the daytimes, from first greeting, every waking second spent aware of where each other was. Very close, usually. Within a stride.  And come evening - when the soot-stained sky closed in ever earlier and darkness afforded them the only privacy they had - they’d set up a canvas home one night at a time on the havens that protected them hour by hour. As their world contracted to the perimeter of the ethereal rune-glow underfoot, so too would any distance between them disappear. Near enough to reach for, though they never did, beyond lingering on the incidental. Leaning close to speak in whispers; a brush of fingers as they passed a plate; a trailing look every now and then. Seeking to share moments between them separate from the group, from the journey, from all the possessive burdens of fate. They’d fall asleep listening to the other breathe.

 

Theirs was a tension they took for granted. A constant humm between them, unacknowledged but in the periphery, as if the spell might unravel should they speak it, and their bond - made tangible - would be pulled into the realm of things that could be challenged. That could break. So they kept their close proximity, existed in each other’s space. They were firm where they stood, side by side, almost touching -- but they were unsure how to take the next step. Afraid of consequence.

 

And they thought they’d always be like this. Inseparable.

  
  


_ Now _

_ ~ _

 

 

There was a frigid bite to the evening tonight. A halo round the moon; ice on the way. The stars bright. 

 

“I’m not used to this yet,” Ignis said, as a shiver took him. It had been a clear day, the sunlight warm on the surface of skin; hope long dormant thawing just beneath it. But clear days bring cold nights, and Ignis had forgotten. He’d left his jacket home. 

 

Still, despite the chill, the night felt comfortable in other ways. Perhaps the sun can burn the scourge from the air, but after ten years, it lingers in the mind. The blue sky still felt too sudden, too vast. Unreal. The nights bought back some familiarity.

 

There had been an insulated claustrophobia to the false horizon of darkness, and now - with it lifted, with the particles rained down dead and washed away - the world grew just to look at, and everything on it became small on the surface. Himself included. Even the buildings that sheltered them, bolstered and pivotal such a short time earlier, appeared now nothing more than battered husks. Each a pock. A scar to pass by. Relevant to the past, and the past only.

 

Noctis shrugged the jacket from his shoulders and draped it around Ignis. The glitzy bits clinked as they re-settled, musical in their chiming, quite beautiful, until stillness held them silent again.

 

“Will you not be too cold now?” Ignis asked.

 

“We can share,” Noctis said, matter of fact. For punctuation he slid his arms around Ignis in a hug, wrapping them tight to the small of his back. He pressed himself close, without hesitation, as though they’d done this a million times before, though they hadn’t. Not like this. At least nothing quite like it, and not for a very long time.

 

“Please don’t have come back just to break my heart,” Ignis whispered; it was a plea slipped unbidden through a crack in his affectation. His breath held. 

 

“I just want to keep you warm, Iggy. Like you kept me. For ten years.”

 

Ignis was quiet, withstanding some tempest trapped wholly within his skin. Noctis was warm against his chest, breathing against his collar. There was no distance between them but Ignis’ stiff surprise. 

 

“If I kissed you now-” Noctis asked, and he leaned back enough to roam his focus all around Ignis’ face- “would you kiss me back?”

 

In his arms, Ignis let go his breath. 

 

“Without reservation.”

  
  


~

 

 

“To think, I almost died and missed all this,” Noct said, his humour as dark as the vacant pane of glass that held the night out and kept the warmth in.

 

Ignis’ silent chuckle was cut short by a gasp as lips hungry for sensation tested the sinew of his neck, giving way to teeth that nipped their way lower, resisted by skin curved taught over firm muscle and hard bone. Ignis held still by force of will, aware of every heated point of contact, of every trace of trailed fingertip, of every sweet measure of resistance in the perfect grip of friction.

 

“We should never have held back all those years,” Noct whispered, each word delivered to a clavicle by a brush of mouth against it, all humour gone. 

 

Ignis, beneath him, snapped to attention. He pulled Noct from his collarbone, trailing a silver string of saliva; held his face firm in both hands, long fingers spread indelicately across the planes of Noct’s cheek. They met eyes and held, bodies as still as the throb between them allowed.

 

“You can’t think like that, Noct. You can’t scour the past for new ways to punish the present.”

 

They both knew this was about harbours of guilt that seeped insidiously through fractured aspects of what could have been. An itchy seam in reality that rubbed Noct raw: guilt for his absence. For the scars on the earth. For the scars on his lover. For surviving.

 

He slipped his fingers between those splayed so firm across his temple; leaned into them with his eyes closed, lash against whorl; turned his head to bury a kiss in the centre of Ignis’ palm. He’d always been like this: a tactile creature, in love with the small moments, smoothing his edges against the feel of his world, however it came. Now, he buried himself in the skin of another, to know he was still real.  

  
  


~

  
  


Ignis found himself following a new habit. 

 

Come mornings, in the pre-dawn pitch, while the dew still glistens and fog hugs the streets beneath, he’d stumble out to the small balcony to wait. A mug steaming in his hands, clouding his view with each sip; a robe doubled high across his chest, wrapped tight at his waist; slippers, to muffle his footfall, that he might exist soundless in his own life a little while. That he might spy on the skyline, catch dawn in the act. 

 

For all its gradual warning - its slow gift of warm grays - that first slip of true sun over the lip of the world never failed to pull the air from his chest. Sometimes it came kindly, sincere in a golden greeting; other times there was a violence to it, a dry sob shaking his bones, and he’d clutch the bannister, broken by gratitude, eyelashes damp and fluttering against a swell of tears. He’d let it pass, turn his back to it all, and retreat to his dark room and his bed kept warm by the beating heart of his lover. 

 

He’d wake up later, a second time, with Noctis tangled easily in his limbs. A fit as perfect as if he’d grown there, forming himself in response to the contours of Ignis’ body. 

 

 

~

 

 

“Ugh it’s too bright,” Noct mumbles in his morning voice, shielding his eyes from the sunlight freshly loosed through the window, eager to infiltrate every corner. It was, in all, a very basic room: the curtains makeshift, salvaged from a theatre; the furniture mismatched, rescued from rooms broken and decaying. The minimum and the necessary. Noct flumped inelegantly into one of two chairs at their small table, squinting up at Ignis’ silhouette. 

 

Ignis still holds the hemmed edge of curtain in his grasp, whirling on the tail end of the flourish that pulled it aside, an expression of incredulous amusement frozen on his face. 

 

“Noct, you are a traitor to your own purpose.” Despite apparent tone, he was smiling.

 

“But that’s in the past now. I’m finally  _ purposeless _ , and it’s too early for that much  _ gleaming _ .”

 

“Well, even if  _ you  _ don’t want it, my plant does.” Ignis finally let go the heavy fabric to let it sway its gathers against the wall. 

 

“Why do you even keep that little thing,” Noct asked, eyeing the twig in its porcelain pot central on the table before him. 

 

“Because it survived,” Ignis said quietly, sitting too. It was almost spoken as a secret kept between him and the small leaves unfurling a crinkled but vibrant green, still tentative and hesitating despite his patient care.

 

Noctis couldn’t say much in response to that. Couldn’t shrug away the importance, like he could with the sunshine and the Raiment and the crowds of strangers who knew him. Besides, he’d been there the day Ignis had dug it from the stale ground, his bare hands uncharacteristically covered in dirt as evidence of his determination. Around them the walls of the Citadel garden were crumbled and ruinous; the barren soil reclaiming benches and pathways and the rubble of statues unrecognisable in their destruction. All was dead and beyond repair, save for this little shoot and its bundle of roots. 

 

“Maybe it’s a weed,” Noct had joked.

 

Regardless, through ten years of darkness, it had somehow survived. 

 

As had he. 

 

They had kissed over the top of it back then, with it cradled in the web of Ignis’ fingers, the smell of disturbed earth fresh between them. And now - across the table propped twice under one leg - they kissed over it again, Noct rising from his seat to reach far enough, his cheeks alive with the light falling on them. 

 

“I’m sorry you lost so much, Ignis,” he said, with that timeless surety he’d bought back with him from beyond. 

 

And Ignis, with his own characteristic depth of grace, replied. “I lost nothing.”

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift for recipeh-for-disaster on Tumblr for the IgNoct White Day gift exchange <3
> 
> I hope you enjoy my interpretation of your prompt! It was lovely spending more time with these beautiful men while I wrote this for you :)


End file.
